Sunday, December 30, 2012

“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” - Taylor Swiftfrom Singles Jukebox:Taylor’s always done teenpop — she’s effortlessly broadened teenpop’s scope to include country, or maybe vice versa, an accomplishment either way — but in taking on the classical teenpop template here, she’s produced a classic of the form, mostly because of her still-evident songwriting craft. The first ace line — “I remember when we broke up/The first time” — turns out to rhyme with “‘cuz like,” so she establishes the song as part parody, a tone that never lets up. Spoken interlude: bratty! (Shania’s were always so stiff.) Four chords: well-deployed! Whiplash plot developments: impossible to follow! At the end of each chorus, the extra “ever”: clever! And there’s real emotional heft, as well — mostly the giddy joy of a master excelling at whatever the hell she wants. We-EEEE![10]“Mirando al Cielo” - Roberto Tapiafrom TSJ:The big swinging tuba is selling point #1 — this year I’ve hung onto some mediocre music for way too long, simply for the stunning tuba parts. #2 is Tapia’s tuba player interlocking with the rest of the banda, which splits into brass and woodwinds to comment like Pips on the action, deliciously messing around with the beat a couple times. Tapia’s singing is #3. He’s straightforward but heartfelt, warbling on the high notes but never cloying, leading out of the choruses on a hard-hitting string of syncopated rhymes right into the triumphant focal point of trumpet solo and horn tutti, #4, that feels like road and sky opening up and allowing us to take flight. Which is weird, since for Tapia the sky offers no escape, only a reminder that his lover exists only on his cell phone.[9]“One Thing” - One Directionfrom TSJ:The one thing I need is energetic young men singing in octaves over major seventh chords and efficient beats. The verses are utter crap — a moratorium, please, on kryptonite/Superman metaphors — so it’s no “I Want It That Way”, but then only a churl would dismiss Mission: Impossible III for failing to attain the heights of Sneakers.[8]“Springsteen” - Eric Churchfrom TSJ:“Every time I think of you, I always catch my breath” … that’d make a lot more sense, but this song isn’t about that song. “That song” — the one that means freedom, lust, masculinity, tattoos, a Jeep, amateur astronomy, and a girl not wanting Eric to go — seems to be “Born In the USA,” which isn’t necessarily weirder than “Jack and Diane” for Kenny Chesney or “Sweet Home Alabama” for Kid Rock. Guitar sounds and unnamed drummers evoke what they will and who can understand the connections? Eric doesn’t try, just as he avoids forcing his specific reverie onto his listeners, sneaking the name of the song into the second verse. As an audio madeleine, “Born In the USA” would seem incongruous to most people, but “Springsteen” the song doesn’t even have to be about Springsteen, really, or sound like him — he’s just big and mythical enough to fade into the scenery of a song whose real subject is a night when every listener was seventeen.[8]“Dirty Dishes” - Mark Mallmanreminds me of dorky Christian alt-rock from the '80s, though obviously it is not

“Mamireru” - Kimura Kaelafrom TSJ:Either that’s a really long chorus or it’s two choruses battling for supremacy. You’ve got your “HEY let’s go!” chorus and then the chorus where she reaches wistfully for high notes — I say “wistfully” not because I think Kimura Kaela actually feels wistful, but because the tune demands wistfulness, so she checks off her wistfulness box like a station attendant initials the bathroom door. You can tell there’s a verse sandwiched in there because it’s got words (about a rhino and mystery?) but it’s not a chorus. The two different instrumental breaks are also not choruses. Wistfulness is fine and everything, but who’s got time for it?[8]

“Rooster in My Rari” - Waka Flocka FlameWe've all been there. One of the more FX-laden and dizzying songs off his current album, and a single, so hey!TOP 10 ALBUMS!1. Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform) (indie, jazz) JAZZ-CLASSICAL MASTERPIECESPopMatters review at bottom

2. Local H - Hallelujah! I’m a Bum (Slimstyle) (indie) RECESSION ROCK(from P&J comments submission)Instead of Japandroids, give me Local H’s Scott Lucas roaring “I smell like a brewery!” while he bounces another check and gets on his dog’s nerves. This all occurs in “Another February”, one of the many funny and/or sad blasts of bullshit-parting off their spectacular new album Hallelujah! I’m a Bum, which I’m hoping other people heard? As duo rock it cuts Japandroids, as recession rock it outdoes Springsteen. The album seized me that increasingly terrible December death week, the one that culminated in Sandy Hook, which still boggles my parental mind if I let it. Until that Friday, it was also a terrible week for many people throughout my various communities in Lake County, IL, coincidentally Local H’s old stomping ground. People just kept dying, making it the worst week ever for handfuls of folks I know, and so by the time Friday rolled around I was grabbing for Local H like they were booze. Lucas’s rage, his ability to be passionately cynical, his taste for beauty and off-putting experimentation all gave me permission to feel sad and angry, like any good catharsis should. (Some of us sicko Pollyanna types need permission, you know.) Lucas refuses to allow easy answers -- mostly while discussing economics and politics, true, but despair is portable. “Your Superman, he says ‘Yes, we can’” -- hey, I have that guy’s bumper sticker! -- “but we’re grains of sand. We get set free in waves again. Jesus saves again. But no one wises up, so no one will rise up,” blah blah blah, that’s just how it goes and no matter how angry this shit makes you, what are you gonna do? (Maybe arm a bunch of teachers and clap like an idiot seal.*) The election and Obama’s first term showed that our country is riven by enormous philosophical chasms, and death is an enormous chasm, and if you pause to let this stuff boggle your mind, it will. So I admire a band who doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but can still make beauty from that. I’m guessing Local H’s favorite book of the Bible, like mine, is the beautiful existential downer Ecclesiastes. I wonder if Japandroids have read it? ‘Cause it’ll really slow you down, and right now Japandroids are busy with their self-importance, dressing up like hipsters and making fun of their exes. The sooner they learn they’re grains of sand, the better.*this is unfair, both to the NRA and to idiot seals, who at least don't want to ARM TEACHERS

4. Taylor Swift - Red (Big Machine) (major, country?) NU-COUNTRYPOLITANfrom PopMatters:Yes yes, Swift filled this album with a “dubstep” song, a U2-style stadium thing, teen-pop for 22-year-olds, and lots of modern rock. But she also wrote ace story songs about troublesome men, grace, partying, home, and fame’s perils—and they’re the same songs. The skills that brought her country fans she applies to new styles with a master’s ease. Her fanbase still loves her, and why not? She sets the intense break-up ache “All Too Well” beside the euphoric “22”, packs an entire world into each, and instantly beats whole genres at their own games. Her singing has never sounded better or more powerful. Her mopey British duet partners don’t take up too much space, and great songs quickly come along to wash them away. Whether Swift’s nü-countrypolitan remains her m.o., or whether Red ends up a Milsap-gone-disco blip, few musicians are packing this much color, craft, and sheer pleasure into their music.5. Ja Rule - PIL2 (MPire/700 Hit Season) (indie, rap) EMO RAPfrom PopMatters:Eight years after his last hit, on his own tiny label that only releases mixtapes and Ja Rule albums, it’s fair to say nobody expected greatness from the incarcerated Queens rapper. As they teach you to say in job interview seminars, Ja Rule turns his weaknesses into strengths, crafting a first-rate emo-rap album with producer 7 Aurelius. The rapper spends the album hating his own fame and wondering what constitutes real life (a “Bohemian Rhapsody” sample was denied.) Sometimes he slurs his bark beyond comprehension, giving the whole thing a desperate and confused feel, especially when he starts praying in the middle of his sex jams (for reasons unknown, he also shouts out that wack Nine Days song, “Story of a Girl”.) But things still cut through the murk: the hook singers’ clear voices, the producer’s vivid production touches, and especially Ja Rule’s love of syncopation, making his syllables snap even when he seems to lose his tether to reality.6. Adrenaline Mob - Omerta (Elm City/EMI) (major, metal) HAIR METALSolos are over-the-top, the cover of Duran Duran's "Undone" stomps, and they deploy tropes and arrangement gimmicks like the pros they are.

7. Thousand Foot Krutch - The End Is Where We Begin (TFK) (indie, CCM, metal) CANADIAN CHRISTIAN RAP-ROCKMore post-Rage post-Tool metal dudes fretting aggressively about their Christian walk, only this time they’re white Canadians and one of ‘em raps! None of this bodes well, but wouldn’t you know -- they pull it off. 12 distinctive singalong tunes with chunky riffs and tricky rhythms, and even their cartoonish aggression is endearing. (Just a courtesy call, brah: they get WICKED.) The melodies are catchy and the rapping’s only slightly embarrassing.

8. John Surman - Saltash Bells (ECM) (indie, jazz) NEW AGEY JAZZThe obvious predecessor is Keith Jarrett's one-man multitracked Spirits, but I also hear a lot of Sonny Sharrock's one-man multitracked Guitar, without the noise but with just as much beauty.

9. Devin Gray - Dirigo Rataplan (Skirl) (indie, jazz) JAZZYou want your free jazz to swing, get the drummer to lead it. Often sounds like strutting second-line stuff with all sorts of appealing gobbeldygook over the top. The melodies often sound like parodies of "angular" jazz heads.

All those descriptions of “monumental” make sense. Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers is first of all BIG: a four-disc 19-track monument to the Civil Rights movement, performed by the 70-year-old Smith on trumpet along with the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music ensemble and the latest incarnation of Smith’s Golden Quartet (or Quintet, if two people are drumming). Whenever he can corral them all to perform the thing live, the concert lasts three nights and covers audiences with heaps of music: free improv, modal jazz grooves, and classical composition including (why not?) a string quartet movement. Though bracketed by tributes to Dred Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., the work is so sprawling it can’t even be constrained by its Civil Rights framework. Songs keep spilling off like free-associative ideas with ungainly titles: “Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press”, “The D.C. Wall: A War Memorial for All Times”, and so on. Monuments seek to overwhelm, and Freedom does its best.

Is there precedent in jazz for such a work? Cecil Taylor’s box sets are even bigger, but they lack a connective framework beyond their performance scenarios. Wynton Marsalis has written extended works for large ensembles, notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields, but unlike Marsalis, Smith refuses to put too fine a point on his ideas. Freedomforgoes singers, and you never catch it winking at the audience; there’s no Marsalisian pastiche or cutesy humor here. Smith’s music speaks with a statesman’s seriousness. These pieces transform their subjects into musical invention and moods; they’re not literal or programmatic. Freedom‘s closest forebears are contemporary classical pieces—“Creative Music”, the AACM veteran might say—that invite meditation and make their points through abstraction.

This shouldn’t imply that you need a music degree to enjoy it. More than anything, Freedom is about sound: the tangible, physically beautiful sounds of Smith’s imperative trumpet and of different instruments in combination, testing their own limits. Most of the lengthy pieces are split into distinct sonic areas, with each area receiving the spotlight in turn. “The Freedom Riders Ride” (song 10, if you’re keeping track) builds from an uncertain opening, the Quartet scattered and thinking out loud, into a ravishing group improvisation. Anthony Davis’s lush piano chords coexist with stripped-bare dissonances, and tempos shift according to some precise telepathy. Then, four minutes in, an ominous stop-start section tumbles into a blazing free walk, with trumpet, piano, bass and Susie Ibarra’s drums all racing along in the sort of collective freedom that jazz exists to celebrate—beautiful beautiful beautiful. But it doesn’t last. Things fall apart, as things do, to focus on the different instruments—sawing bass, skittering drums—building until another fast walk ends the piece. If lightning-fast swing is the reason you turn to jazz, Freedomhas plenty such passages, but its explorations of space and stillness are just as crucial.

For all these and more, credit Smith’s musicians and his compositional methods. Like many modern jazz and classical composers, Smith has developed his own system for organizing improv. He calls it “Ankhrasmation,” a graphic notation that helps musicians coordinate their jumping-off points. While he doesn’t seem to have used that system in Freedom, his goal is similar. Pre-ordained motives move inexorably to moments of spontaneous creation and back again. Even during the slow parts, when the music threatens to crawl to a stop or turn into a hazy Terence Blanchard score, violin and cello and trumpet hold their notes slightly out of tune, vibrato and dissonance beating with portent, and the effect is riveting. Every instrument pops; sound and silences pulse with vitality.

If Freedom resembles a monument, at least in my mind, it’s the Gateway Arch in St. Louis—“just a big piece of modern art on the bank of the river,” a friend once affectionately described it. It’s abstract and even austere, sure, but that only makes it more universally accessible. A short walk from the courthouse where Dred Scott sued for his freedom, the Arch embodies different shades of symbolic meaning. Depending on your sympathies, it can be a soul-stirring paean to Western expansion, a costly reminder of American imperialism, or a fun place to go on a field trip. All sorts of stuff, good and bad, baked into an inverted steel catenary. Freedom lacks the Arch’s simplicity of line, but its takeaways are just as complex. It’s never simply a celebration or a lament, a history lesson or a big piece of modern art. You don’t have to choose, Smith seems to say; this music contains everything.

Freedom is even sort of shaped like the Arch; it climbs to a rarefied peak. The album’s 24-minute centerpiece, “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964”, stretches austere abstraction to its limits, but it contains moments that rival Stravinsky’s famous Rite chord for time-stopping sound, moments you could reach out, touch, crawl inside, and settle down with. It’s quantum music theory: the strum of a harp contains the world. Live with this music long enough and it seeps into the rest of your life. These days I can’t look at Robert Caro’s massive LBJ biography, or even think about America’s elongated battle over health care reform, without hearing the roiling timpani that define “Great Society”, giving voice to slow-motion legislative wars in every age.

Monuments overwhelm, but they do so by speaking to us personally. Like visiting a sacred site or reading Tolstoy or Proust, listening to Freedom is an emotional and intellectual luxury, a chance to commune with greatness. Years after I’d taken my last field trip to the Arch, I graduated from school and moved back to St. Louis, for the first time living on my own in a cramped little apartment. One day I parked at the library and walked to the river, and as the Arch loomed before me I was overcome by emotion. Besides being a symbol of Western expansion, the Arch had become my expansion, at once my freedom and homecoming, my destiny tied to the country’s destiny. Ten Freedom Summers speaks like a great civic monument. In four and a half hours, Wadada Leo Smith writes one of America’s defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours.

Chances are you’ve already got some of these singles from the 1920s sitting around the house. Charlie Patton’s roaring “High Water Everywhere—Part 1”, Bukka White’s chugging proto-rap “The Panama Limited”, and J.P. Nester’s amazing “Train on the Island”, where fiddle and banjo meld into what resembles an electro-minimalist maelstrom—these are oft-compiled elsewhere. But unless you’re one of the

dementeddedicated collectors depicted in this compilation’s 50-page booklet, you don’t have them all in one place, and you probably don’t have some of the other Stuff. Maybe you need Joe Evans & Arthur McClain’s deadpan “Two White Horses” (a.k.a. “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”), complete with church bell and coffin sound effects. Or “Old Molly Hair”—which, according to Fiddling Powers himself, was “lost in the building of King Solomon’s temple,” and concerns the shooting of a bear and cuckleberries caught in hair. Smattered with Irish and Polish rarities, these 46 exuberant oldies invite you to dance away your death obsessions.

As he says, Nas must have half-naked pictures of God or something. Eleven albums in, he remains a spectacular rapper, albeit one who doesn’t need to make a spectacle of himself. Whether discussing his divorce, fatherhood, plans to topple investment banks, or summers on smash, Nas has honed his complex rhyme schemes for maximum ease of communication. He taunts young pipsqueaks who kill people accidentally; he sympathizes with a middle aged doctor contemplating uxoricide while performing surgery. He shouts out Kelis and makes their story interesting, even if you haven’t been following along. He hates when people write him hostile texts—who doesn’t? The guy’s turned into a wealthy charmer, and his producers’ opulent beats back him up, peaking with the orchestral banger “A Queens Story” but rarely flagging. In fact—do my ears deceive me?—Life Is Good might be a better album than his revered debut. At least, I’d rather listen to it.

And, just because I like when songs incorporate Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude":

"One of the best bands we have ever had," says Matt Cibula in his PopMatters review, and based on this album you don't doubt him. They've been on a tear recently, getting weirder while singing about trains and travel. Here the guitar tones are huge and indelible, keyboard textures cut in and out at unpredictable intervals, drums rock, Ann REALLY rocks.

Keeping Nashville horn players employed since 2010, this goofball proudly endorses the man in the moon and insists that he is a man, not a fraction. (Maybe that’ll end the rumors.) Niemann’s post-Big & Rich country mixes metaphors and styles with abandon, its exquisitely chiseled production sweeping you from song to song. Free the Music veers from Beck to honky-tonk weeper, the ominous “Get On Up” to the lite tropical “I’ll Have to Kill the Pain”. It all seems like breezy showboating until “Only God Could Love You More”, a massive ballad that’ll awaken your inner 14-year-old to the knowledge that love is awesome. God, too; though he’s less prominent in Niemann’s cosmology than alcohol or Jessie James, who has the courtesy to rhyme with “Guessing Games”, the title of a dark new wave strutter. “Do you know what is completely obnoxious?,” asks Niemann of his mystery woman. Sometimes the answer is Jerrod Niemann, but he’s always real nice about it.

And, just because I'd like to preserve the discussion, traditionalist commenter Al3x 0rr proposed the following:

"I feel a a good trad country album should top a dance-pop album marketed as country any day in a list of best country releases. A terrific album exemplifying the best aspects of a genre's style should be among the qualities looked for in a great album when talking about releases within that particular genre."He also noted, "I just gave a listen to the Jerrod Niemann album and I'd love to know what makes this country and not lite-rock pop soul." He went on, "Did y'all actually hear [Marty Stuart's unmentioned-in-the-list] "Nashville, Vol. 1: Tear the Woodpile Down" and decide that it was simply not among the ten best country albums released in 2012? If you can explain to me how Jerrod Niemann's album is a better "country" album, I'd love to hear it."I responded,

Alex, since I wrote up your three main offenders, I’ll go. Really good comment, btw, but I disagree with your philosophical point that “a good trad country album should top a dance-pop album marketed as country any day in a list of best country releases. A terrific album exemplifying the best aspects of a genre's style should be among the qualities looked for in a great album when talking about releases within that particular genre.”

I don’t presume to know what country SHOULD sound like; but I do know when something sounds country or seems country. Carrie Underwood and Jerrod Niemann sound country -- at least half their songs deal in standard country tropes and incorporate traditional country instrumentation. I could see the argument that Taylor Swift’s current album doesn’t sound country, but she’s enough identified with the genre and beloved by its fans, who consider themselves country fans even if you don’t, that she counts too. So of all the people who I’m letting into the genre, I pick the ones I like best, in order, because maybe the ones who aren’t as “traditional” are teaching me something I didn’t know about the genre. Maybe Jerrod Niemann’s bizarre sense of humor is one of those heretofore unexplored “best aspects of a genre’s style” that you mention. (Although really he’s not too far from the Statler Brothers.) This is how genres thrive and continue to speak to people! When they stop doing so, THAT’S how genres die.

I won’t pretend to know the Stuart album well enough for some head-to-head cage match. It sounds good, actually, but I prefer Niemann’s humor, instrumental variety, and occasional goopy romantic excess. (Not something I’m generally in favor of, but he makes it work.) I identify with him more and I’d rather listen to his album. And he’s definitely country! Are you gonna tell me “Whiskey Kinda Way” isn’t country? Regardless of whether he’d have been considered country in any other decade, we’re not living in any other decade, you know?

I understand your moral qualms about listening to Waka Flocka's songs of violence, misogyny, and materialism. My defense has three aspects.

1. Yes, his songs view women as objects intended for male pleasure, and they value cars and guns and swag and other shiny objects over stuff like human interaction and feelings. So, you know, he's doing "Blue Suede Shoes" to a gaudy extreme. But these are not necessarily prescriptive songs -- they're depictions of a culture. ("Strip clubs is our culture, we some heavy spenders," he says in "Candy Paint & Gold Teeth".) I don't know Waka's history, but who among us has come into money and immediately realized the most edifying ways to use it? As Jay-Z pointed out in his Terry Gross interview, young rappers often have unhealthy attitudes towards wealth and women, but they learn and they grow. (As a result, maybe their music turns as uninteresting as Jay-Z's recent stuff?) As Jonathan Bradley put it at Singles Jukebox, "Whether you’re broke or rich, you gotta get this: having money’s not everything, not having it is." (Sometimes I feel like the rest of us are writing in Bradley's shadow.)

2. Again: NOT PRESCRIPTIVE. Not even trying to be! Waka's big strip club hit "Round of Applause" sounds morose, a little like Moroder's Neverending Story music for the scenes involving Swamps of Sadness or nihilistic wolves. The lyrics may be celebratory, but the music is anything but -- you feel trapped in Waka's club/Rari, maybe WAKA feels trapped. It's a juxtaposition that cuts way deeper than, for example, Jason Aldean's recent "I feel sad for this stripper" song.

3. Musically this stuff is a fantastic hall of mirrors, with crazy voices around every corner shouting "FLOCKAAAA" or "SQUAAAAAD" or "BRIIIIIIICK" or "POWPOWPOWPOW," crazy shifts in texture from full synth overload to acapella barking and back again.

So listening to Waka may be morally ambiguous, sure, but show me a part of your life that's NOT morally ambiguous. Does it sound this good?

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Zeb Malik makes ramshackle little indie rock tunes, snatches of riff presided over by a wafting tenor, a thrift-store Marshall Crenshaw chanting a liturgy of slack. Lucky for Malik his instrumental timbres are catchier than most people’s tunes — cf. “Let’s Get Away”, a suicide drink of Van Halen’s synths, Sonic Youth’s white noise, Kate Bush’s Fairlight flute, and Phil Collins’s drums. (Did you know “Phil Collins” is the technical term for a familiar drum rudiment?) The ‘80s will ALWAYS be back. “Losn My Mind” features a sound I desperately wish was an electrified oboe but probably isn’t. Malik also includes several ingratiating “mood” pieces; their mood is the totally relatable “I feel like messing around with this button on the keyboard.” Pick hit is “Bummer Summer”, an evocation of summers past that gets by on its guitar treatment. Though actually, the tune’s not bad either.

Those seeking erudite takes on this wonderful music should read Nate Chinen's Times review, which nicely covers Iyer's background and musical concerns. The rhythmic achievement is most blatant -- this trio does stuff rhythmically I can't begin to wrap my head around, and that's often what I look for in music, you know? What can I not do myself? Or what do I not already understand? But he tempers it with a crowd-pleasing sensibility that's just as blatant. When they cover (or "deconstruct," or whatever) MJ's "Human Nature", I realize they love it for the same reason I do -- the harmonic suspension in the verse ("looking OUT", the tonic stays in place on "OUT" and scrapes against the rest of the chord) that doesn't resolve until the chorus: "why, WHY", the second "WHY" is on the same chord but now the suspension is resolved... look, I'm sure someone's concocted a better way to talk about this stuff, but let's just say "Human Nature" is in Josh's Top 10 Songs Ever, basically because those Toto dudes know their shit, and Iyer preserves the song's gloopy appeal for me while taking it someplace new, and that's why I love his music and don't just respect his skill and craft. Other good songs too.

Friday, December 21, 2012

So sue me, I've always been a Van Hagar partisan, which might make me ineligible to write about music with any authority, sort of like my continuing love for Daughtry's voice. (Seriously, he doesn't sound like everybody else!) I could bore you with the long list of journal entries devoted to '80s VH power ballads, the time I found a discarded OU812 cassette outside the school and painstakingly took it apart and respooled the tape so it'd play and then drew a beautiful album sleeve depicting my jam "Feels So Good" (little stick dude on an island throwing a bottle), or how singles from Balance (BALANCE!) got me through my wisdom teeth exile.

Um, what were we talking about? Right. I was thinking my Van Hagar partisanship might explain my ongoing love for the creamily misogynistic chorus of "You and Your Blues." This album is not Van Hagar, it's the return of David Lee Roth and some semblance of caring from the rest of the band. Little Wolfgang is on bass, and each of the three components -- Roth, Eddie, and rhythm section -- has more personality than most of the people on this list. The album's not higher because its tunes sort of peter out, but when they coalesce into hooks, the hooks sound like they could only come from these actors. Roth's lost his little grace-note shrieks, but he still swoops into choruses like a freakin' LOCOMOTIVE driving through SOME KIND OF PORTAL FROM ANOTHER WORLD (i don't even know what that is), Eddie busts out singable solos and unsingable freakazoid solos and fills and riffs that comment on whatever Roth is doing, and the really very powerful rhythm trax would be worth hearing by themselves. Just to clarify -- it doesn't sound like the Hagar years, because Roth would never allow that. But the best of this is continuous with the best of the Roth years.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

What I will have written at the PopMatters "Hopes to Hit It Big" feature; honestly, if this album hasn't hit it big yet, I don't hold out much hope.

Why these guys aren’t topping the pop charts is beyond me. Well, OK, half the time Esau Mwamwaya sings in Chewa, the language of his native Malawi. But if you figure 2012 is the year foreign languages broke with “Gangam Style”; and if you factor in The Very Best’s collaborations with the very familiar Taio Cruz, Bruno Mars, K’Naan, and Amadou & Mariam; and especially if you consider that producer Johan Hugo’s beats are catchier than pinkeye in a preschool, they should be all over the place! They need to release “Kondaine” as a single! (Oh wait...) At least they’re touring Europe now, so catch ‘em on your spring break travels and listen to their excellent 2012 multi-culti dance-pop album MTMTMK, endorsed by NPR. (Hey, it’s something.) I foresee hip licensing deals in their future.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Less austere than the debut, album #2 sounds lusher and more varied, but still with loud beats and guitars and brattiness. It's catchy. Hard to find anything to say about it. Is that why many people don't like it? (Minor controversy at Singles Jukebox.) In a sense I agree with Jukeboxer Z. Ly0n who says, "I'm not sure they were ever supposed to make a second record," except I really like this second record. The Sleigh Bells' problem -- how do you follow up something so formally original? -- reminds me of Mike Figgis following up the four-simultaneous-quadrants-digitally-shot Timecode, except that I'm not sure how he did follow it up. But he didn't launch a career consisting solely of four simultaneous quadrants digitally shot. If he did it might seem forced. If Sleigh Bells kept making austere one-chord cheerleader metal, that might seem forced too. So here they embrace Def Leppard.